Through The Mind's Eye
The photography of my late husband the neuroscientist Charlie Gross (February 29, 1936 - April 13, 2019)
A shorter version of this essay originally appeared in “Progress in Neurobiology: Special Issue in Honor of Charles Gross,” December 2020.
Edited and arranged by Robert Friedman
When those whom we love pass from us it is a fundamental shock—that they are not merely absent from us, but gone.
There is nowhere to reach them—nowhere to find them, still less speak with them. Apart from photographs and other mementos, they vanish from the earth.
If the loved one is a writer, his books may be on shelves; but his presence is much reduced. If he has left behind works of art, however, that might be hung on walls, that might be seen by his survivors, as well as people who had never known him, there is possible another sort of “presence”—not the person himself, of course, but his “self-portraits.”
All serious photography is a kind of “self-portraiture.” The photographer is drawn to preserve only what seems to him supremely beautiful, in whatever idiosyncratic way “beauty” might be described. If the world is essentially a mystery, research scientists are investigators, explorers, pilgrims, even at times mystics; “scientific method” is the crucial tool, but the motive underlying the pursuit of intransigent truth in a world of shifting illusions and delusions is likely to be deep-rooted in the personality, as the motives for art are deep-rooted, essentially unknowable. The research scientist, like the writer and artist, is not satisfied with surfaces—the “superficial”; the comprehension of underlying principles and laws are the goal.
Neuroscience dares to address the most basic of all questions involving life: what is the neural basis of behavior? how can it possibly be that out of molecules, ions, and nerve cells somehow there emerges the vast richness of human consciousness and experience? It isn’t an accident that Charlie Gross spent most of his professional life exploring vision in the cerebral cortex—that he became one of the most distinguished neuroscientists of his generation through the intensity of his vision and the general obstinacy of his personality.
All serious photography is a kind of “self-portraiture.”
When I came to know him, it was after the prime of his career as a researcher at Princeton University; he had closed his legendary laboratory, and was concentrating on the history of neuroscience, an original course of his own on neuro-ethics, and photography.
Indeed, Charlie was never more fiercely concentrated in thought—(if indeed it was “thinking” that so absorbed him)—than when he was taking photographs, and afterward working with the digital images he’d captured.
It isn’t an accident that Charlie Gross spent most of his professional life exploring vision in the cerebral cortex—that he became one of the most distinguished neuroscientists of his generation through the intensity of his vision...
Out of the raw image, what “meaning” can be discovered? The camera lens radically narrows the visual field into an aesthetically satisfying form because it is limited, reduced; “coherence” is created out of a chaos of impressions that without the camera lens lack focus and meaning. Surely there is some fundamental analogy here with the mechanisms of the eye—the visual cortex.
Though Charlie most admired such photographers as Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Davidson, Diane Arbus, and Gary Winograd, whose work exudes an air of uncompromising (social) realism, his own photography tends to be of landscapes so exceptional they verge upon the surreal.
Perhaps this is a consequence of Charlie’s many travels to parts of the world that are, to our eyes, “exotic”—“ahistorical.” He does have many photographs set in urban areas, many portraits of a great diversity of people whom he’d met on his travels, but for this gathering of photographs I have selected those that are most abstract and apolitical—indeed, ahistorical—in their beauty; and those set in the West, which he loved and had visited many times.
Often Charlie was fascinated by intricacies and repetitions, as in rock formations, that seemed (to me) to mimic the intricate folds of human and animal brains (which Charlie had many times dissected)—though I would never have suggested this to Charlie since he was skeptical of any effort to link his work as a neuroscientist with his photography, and he did not wish to be “analyzed.”
(Among artists, many are theoreticians of their own art, and have given much thought to aesthetics; from Picasso to Andy Warhol, it isn’t uncommon that an artist wishes to present his views of art, as a kind of defense or argument. Charlie was not one of these.)
Charlie and I were married in March 2009 and in the decade we spent together traveled widely—to Spain, Italy and the Greek Islands, Capri, Corsica, Dubrovnik, Galapagos and Ecuador, Australia, and Bali as well as, more frequently, to London, Paris, Rome, and (his favorite) Venice.
We spent time in the most scenic parts of California—Berkeley, Humboldt State Redwood Park, Big Sur; we visited many National Parks—Death Valley, Bryce Canyon, Zion, Yosemite.
To all these places Charlie brought his photography equipment and spent many hours taking pictures, ideally at dawn. He was exacting and patient; he could wait a long time for a perfect combination of landscape, sky, and light.
His work is surpassingly beautiful—not a consequence of accident but design.
Though Charlie did not “photoshop” his work, he spent much time selecting images he wanted to make permanent. He was a serious artist of beauty but he did not theorize—he followed his intuition.
I am so sorry now, as his widow, that I did not “follow him to the ends of the earth”—as I think he wanted me to. I did not accompany him on his many (thirteen?) visits to China, his favorite country to photograph; I did not accompany him to India (in the rainy monsoon season!), and I did not accompany him to Antarctica (where he found images of stunning beauty), and I did not accompany him to Mongolia (which would turn out to be Charlie's final hardship adventure). At the time of his death in April 2019 we were planning a trip to Bora-Bora, Tahiti, and New Zealand. Unknowingly, we had run out of time.
Clare-- this is so touching! very wonderful to hear from you after years.
remembering those days which for me were happier days.
warmly
Joyce
After reading this, I looked around my house, "the nest of us" that my Fred and I have made after 40 years of marriage, 30 of them spent in this house. We're both artists, collectors of things that mean something to us, and there are thousands of photographs detailing fleeting moments and visions. We will leave behind a varied, yet concise pair of self-portraits that will reveal our lives as we grew together. Thank you for this gift today.